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A flicker of confusion quirked his brows, and then he gestured towardDesert Dreams.“I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. I don’t know why…it speaks to me, somehow.”
It should, Lucy thought to herself.It’s about us. Now, the title seemed too obvious. Too foolish. Too dangerous. Lucy’s breath caught in her chest as her thoughts returned to that fateful night that inspired the painting.
Escaping into her art had soothed her soul and her pain. And for some reason, she was glad Anwar was now the new owner. One day, she would tell her son about their love story. Her child would never know he was unwanted. She would protect him from that hurt. The love with which he was conceived was embodied in the painting. As for Anwar? She felt nothing.
Worry wormed through her gut as she registered the lie. She prayed inwardly that Anwar would be content to add her paintings to his already formidable art collection and that their paths would never cross again.
“The painting evokes such strong feelings,” he said. “There’s something about the whole collection. Something deliciously familiar.”
She shuddered as she caught the dangerous glint dancing in his eyes.
“What am I missing?”
Lucy shook her head, sending a curtain of glossy blonde hair sweeping across her shoulders. “Nothing. They’re landscapes from my mind. Dreams. That’s all. I wouldn’t read too much into them.”
“Dreams,” he repeated. “The feeling that one has been reborn.”
A gaze of silent understanding united them, muting the noise and clatter of the crowd. She felt suddenly adrift, like sand in a storm. A reckless desire to confess the truth rose from her belly. “Anwar, there’s something?—”
“Lucy, another collector, Grace Hunt, Executive Chairwoman of Ferrari, would like to meet you,” Maria said, rushing to her side before the truth could be revealed. “Grace is also a trustee of MoMA. She adores your series and insists I introduce you. If I may steal Lucy away, Your Royal Highness?” Maria added apologetically.
The ill-timed request temporarily shattered their sacred union. Perhaps it was just as well. Anwar and she had a flawed history. He had proven he was unreasonable, unpredictable, and unreliable. It would be naive and foolish to trust that he would do the right thing by her when he discovered she was carrying his son.His firstborn child. His heir.
“Wait!” Anwar said suddenly, with an air of explosive command. “I’ll buy them all.”
“The paintings?” Maria asked. “All of them?”
Lucy’s pulse rate ricocheted as Anwar nodded his agreement. Was he love-bombing her? Anwar was a collector, she reminded herself. He was a numbers man who prided himself on his many conquests and the elusive artworks he possessed. She told herself that adding a newly discovered artist to his already formidable art collection was his only motive, not believing a word. She wasn’t freshly discovered. She was his disgraced lover, fooled by his excessive attention and thrown to the wolves under the weight of false accusations.
Lucy gripped the edge of her catalog as Maria placed red dots beneath the paintings and glided away to add up the sales and tally her commission.
No, Lucy reassured herself. Anwar was acquiring her paintings because they were good. That he would ever be interested in her romantically again was the domain of dreams. Besides, he had betrayed her. She wanted nothing more to do with him. As she turned to leave, Anwar reached out and gently caught her hand. Every whisper of hair on her body rose in heightened awareness as he laced his fingers through hers.
“Don’t go.”
CHAPTERTHREE
“You’ve made an important acquisition, your Highness. Congratulations,” Maria gushed as she pressed glasses bubbling with champagne toward them.
“I’m not drinking,” Lucy said, scorchingly aware that Anwar’s dark, searching eyes didn’t leave her as she politely declined the alcohol and reached for a glass of sparkling water.
“The series reveals Lucy’s powerful gifts of expressionism and color,” Maria continued. “In Lucy’s own words,” she said, reading from the catalog, “‘With some paint, I can barely control it; I can only follow its lead. It tells me how it wants to be painted.’”
Years of advising wealthy and discerning collectors on what to buy for their collections had taught Lucy that artists’ statements were a critical component of marketing the arts. Still, she hated the hype, especially when talking about her own work.
She painted simply because it made her happy. It made her forget her trauma. It made her forget about Anwar and the pain he had inflicted. Instead, she painted their love story. The one she had dreamed of, the illusion only painting could make real.
“Don’t you just love the glints of gold, the giant expanses of the canvas, flowing with orange-reds and turquoise greens, dancing like prisms of light across the wash of baby blue?” Maria said as her gaze drifted to the vast abstract landscape writhing in a rainbow of luscious curves running the length of the far wall. “The works are so evocative. Layered with subtle memories of things seen and loved. Pregnant with possibility.”
Lucy gulped. If Maria could read the unspoken secrets beneath the layers, could he?
“The collection is atour de force, a canvas full of joy,” Anwar agreed, turning to Lucy as Maria drifted toward a bunch of European collectors chatting with their peers about commissioning a series of works.
“The painting made you lose control?” Anwar drawled teasingly, thinly disguising the memory of the night he stole her virginity. “How did the works want to be painted?” he said, trailing his finger over the honey-hued dunes rounded like naked breasts. “What stories do they tell?” Anwar asked.
“Tales of independence and autonomy and, above all else, freedom,” Lucy said unhesitatingly.
“Freedom?”
